13nov2025

Here's a little collaged piece, decorations on the back of an envelope for a friend's birthday note.

And, to create enough text so the intro layout works correctly, a perennial favourite, someone calling out men who want to repeal the 19th amendment (that's the one that gave universal suffrage, i.e. women the right to vote). Nothing new to see here, if you haven't the spoons; the notable elements of this particular takedown, at least to my eyes, is that 1) they chose one of the most beautiful depictions of rape ever created, and 2) the author was so authentically an ally I didn't realize he was male till I got to the end of the article, scrolled back up and saw his name, so, go you, Mr Alan Elrod.

(I really wasn't paying attention. Not only did I have to look for the author's name, instead of, you know, noticing it right under the title where such things are traditionally put, then I went digging around my elderly of Art Through the Ages, (so old that I bought it used for under $20) without doing much except identifying the period, which, duh, was plainly obvious from the twisting poses (it's by Bernini, and Baroque, if you care) before dimly recalling that with that crown, it must be Hades and Persephone, and with a bit a googling found the wikipedia link. Which, um, was at the bottom of the article. Le sigh. I'm not brain-dead, I just play something like on the internet. Have a little piece of art, emphasis on the little, as that appears to be all I'm capable of...)

12nov2025

Hi all.

I'm back to watching a lot of lo-content stuff while I continue to tidy my office/catch up on years of ephemera/journalling, so no linkies today:)

Absolutely loved coming home from a short trip to a tidy office, but now I'm trying to figure out how to simultaneously keep it that way, and continue to do the journalling. Turns out it can be tricky to keep a more-or-less continuously-in-use space tidy, at least without copious designated areas for in-progress projects.

But I'm determined to figure this out! And very happy to finally be making some art, even if it's very small scope.

31oct2025

The little book group to which I semi-belong recently read Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, which I missed out on, because my gmail account was not really working during the time they were discussing it, which I failed mostly to notice because I was so busy. But I ordered it anyway, and figured I could give it a go.

My go got up and went by chapter one.

By the end of the introduction, I knew this thing was gonna be an uncomfortable slog, and I struggled to identify why I was so deeply uncomfortable with it. Holiday claims he wrote the book because after running these scams to blow up marketing campaigns on the internet, he felt guilty, and thought to atone by exposing his secrets.

Problem was, I didn't believe him.

That's not terribly surprising, and I think it's perfectly fair if an acknowledged grifter is held to a higher standard for veracity than someone without that history. Thus despite Holiday's assertion that he wrote the book because (he said) he felt guilty about his past behaviour, his current style was giving off uncomfortable vibes.

I mean, in addition to the fact that he was still working for American Apparel and Tucker Carlson, both of which I'd heard bad things for years; not to mention opening his book with a quote from Orson Scott Card. Now, to be sure, I had the first edition, published in 2012, and the big pedo-related controversies didn't come out till the following year. But Card's homophobia was certainly documented, and taken together, his continued support for dicey people and organizations did not exactly reassure.

Nor did his “tone”. I couldn't precisely identify it, but it reminded me, I finally realized, of the preacher-grifters whom Fred Clark of Slacktivist is constantly taking to task. In a fairly recently essay, Slack cites a band member of the Juggalos (of what are magnets/how do they work fame?) as a person who has sincerely repented, who is angry at his former self—for hurting the feelings of some of his audience he'd formerly mocked.

That anger, according to slack, was a marker for authentic repentance. A still slyly acknowledged cleverness in past bad behaviour, otoh, was infallibly a sign that the person still had some work to do. Holiday was twanging that string hard, and I disliked the vibe.

Perhaps one indicator was his cynicism: even after writing this book, it was clear that the author still felt that the internet on which he (formerly) preyed was merely a cesspit of parasites like himself, and rubes. That's a pretty dark way to see the world: I presume that 5%, roughly, of society consists of parasites (or perhaps, people act in grifty ways 5% of the time) but that most people, most of the time, are trying their best. Presuming every one is a crook strikes me as an excuse for one's own bad behaviour.

As I said, I didn't get very far into this book; mebbe the second edition addresses the problems. A quick perusal of Goodreads suggested that a fair number of other readers had similar qualms, and, frankly, it's not really news to me (or any other feminist online) that there's a ton of disinformation artists out there—indeed any relatively powerless group is likely to be the target of these assholes.

I'd rather learn from the victims than the perpetrators, so back to the library this book went. —Compared to people like the author, my little halloween art is hardly scary, but I hope you'll enjoy it as more wholesome horror.

29oct2025

So I was casually(1) listening to Gutsick Gibbon discuss in a video how human ancestors shifted to the wide, flat pelvis that allows us, unlike our close cousins, the bonobos and chimpanzees, to walk upright—evidently one of those 1 or 2 gene changes that had a big morphological impact, which I'd heard about in other evolutionary contexts, but not this one—when the youtuber happened to mention, offhand, that because of our sweat glands we heal three times more slowly than other primates, and I wuz like, wait, wut?

So I looked it up, and it's legit: I've known for awhile that although H sapiens are not especially fast or strong, we do have good endurance, because of our robust cooling mechanisms, to wit, a lot more sweat glands than other animals—we don't overheat as readily. I mean, think about those poor kitties, who can only dump heat through their paw pads or by panting!(2)

The actual paper only cites sweat glands as a possible tradeoff (if I'm reading correctly, and I'm guessing Gutsick is hella better reading scientific papers than I am, so what looks as only a supposition to me might be plainly obvious to someone up on the literature, or perhaps more papers have come out, though this one's pretty recent, just from April of this year) but evolution, being very much a rube goldbergian process, is often a case of tradeoffs—this trait for that advantage lost, but hey, if it means more successful offspring, then even with disadvantages the new trait is likely to propagate.

So that was my TIL (today I learned) moment. Enjoy. Or have a little Halloween inktober bookmark.

(1)Somehow I suspect I'm not the only person to use youtube videos, etc., as a sort of timer to stay on the tidying tasks that have dominated my life for the last two months? Like so many things, I got into this habit during Covid.

This one was organizing my photographic equipment, which means, maaaaaybe, sooooommmmme day, I will figure out why my flash stopped working, and start taking better pictures again? At the very least, I discarded batteries and chargers for cameras I threw out 5 or 10 years ago...

(2)Actually, cats can also cool themselves by wetting down their fur, aka grooming. But there's a reason my favourite pet grooming youtuber watches carefully for signs of heat stress!

27oct2025

Here's a fridayfugly, even though it's Monday, but in my defense, first we lost power on Thursday, as I was writing this page and then our internet connection for most of Friday. No blogging for me! Well, that did at least encourage me to start organizing the garden shed.

This, after weeks of attempting to organize my office, which as also become my defacto mixed media/journalling area, and keeping track of all that paper is—almost—worse than organizing my bead collection.

But the joy! the pleasure! My profound admiration for those creatives who find a messy space congenial, but to those for whom a tidy spare one is welcoming, well, hang in there, cuz the results really are worth it. And if all the assorted productivity hacks/low time/energy/spoons, or honestly, cash to buy the storage solutions that proved to be absolutely essential to these tasks don't allow for this kind of demanding project, give yourself grace—I really wondered sometimes, if I'd ever have a tidy house (and I still don't really, but I'm seeing light at the end of the tunnel?), but honestly, my parents didn't really achieve it until their 60s, and I'm halfway through that; it can take a looooooong time to master this sort of thing:)

(So can drawing. I've been doing that for over six decades, and I still screw up regularly. Here's an example.)

15oct2025

Ooooh, art linkies.

This article delves into a small detail of Rembrandt's most famous painting, the origin of the little dog's (pose), in The Night Watch for which the researcher provides a very reasonable hypothesis that the artist basically ...swiped it from somebody else.

This sort of thing still happens—I recall vaguely some controversy over comic book artists “stealing” poses, compositions and the like from each other—but it was a lot more acceptable back then: when I went to the Rachel Rusych exhibit earlier this year, the curators noted a number of details that she and other flower painters borrowed from each other.

One reason this isn't shock! horror! the thievery! is that this dog figure is not only a very small part of a huge painting but it's quite dark; it's meant to help suggest the mood, rather than being a major focal point. Rembrandt may have simply liked the pose, or admired the other artist, or even subconsciously replicated the dog.

But we don't know. As Lenders, the curator, notes, we're still finding stuff out about this painting, and AFAICT, the artist's reasoning (beyond the fact that he liked it) for adding this little motif is still unknown.

Oddly enough, this same painting is referenced in a MIT article about artists and shadows. Western “realistic” painting has a number of conventions the average person accepts without considering, and one is the depiction of shadows. Careful analysis often—usually, even—reveals that artists generalize shadows to simplify their rendering, draw the viewer's eye or otherwise emphasize what the artist considers important: thus, shadows tend not to fall on important figures in a composition, because the assumption is that the human viewers will be far more interested in the depiction of people than the shadows falling upon them.

For the researchers referenced in the article, the way in which artists abstract shadows is a fascinating window in the way our brains assemble (or don't) visual information. For me, it was mostly nice to know that I'm not the only one whose understanding of perspective isn't really up to the task of representing shadows in a rigorous way.

(Let alone mirror images, aka reflections—mirrors are traditionally shown in [western] comics as a surface with a few blank lines, and a lot of art simplifies this challenging task: if you, as an artist, want to get it absolutely right, then David Chelsea's Perspective for Comic Book Artists is the best (not to mention entertaining) manual I've found to learn that sort of stuff.)

But! Along those lines, and pivoting a bit to science, Minute Physics has a six minute video in which he promises—correctly, in my case—to ruin depictions of the crescent moon forever. The teal dear is that, again w/r/t to reflections and shadows, the horns of the moon can never extend past the midline, that is an equal bisection of the moon. To be sure, this made me a bit sad, though I will say in my defense that I never have drawn stars in the ‘dark’ part of the moon, because, duh, the moon blocks the stars behind it.

Minute is scratching his head because the moon is up there in the sky for anyone to see and evaluate, so how can people fail to notice these basic facts? Well, I think it's for the same reason modern artists tend to draw horse legs, especially their hocks, more like the legs of a dog—because while you can certainly look up what a horse looks like, even watch videos of them moving, the average person has hella more exposure to dogs and cats on a daily basis, because most people nowadays live in cities; horses are not the everyday critturs they were a century ago, unless you happen to be, say, Amish or an avid horse person. Look at etchings from the 1800s, however, and horse legs, even by mediocre artists, are depicted far more realistically on average. As is harness, for that matter, and for the same reason—the artist likely rode or drove horses regularly, or if not, certainly saw them on a daily basis.

In a similar way, while we can certainly see the moon, there's a lot of light pollution, buildings and trees that block the horizon, not to mention that most people spend their time indoors. So the long blocks of time to observe the moon, its changing phases and appearance throughout the day, are now cut up into glimpses that are not (for the physics-averse) intuitive to assemble into a coherent framework for how the moon shifts thru the day and night, let alone the seasons.

Aaaaaannnnd here's the quickie inktober sketch I hung this intro upon.